Doubting the Answers 59
how things were, then indeed we would be able to hold God
accountable to ethical standards beyond himself. But this is
logically impossible. (And here, for anyone uncertain about
the logic of the traditional Christian metaphysical claims re-
garding God, I refer readers to my earlier book The Experi-
ence of God.) So, really, it makes no sense to take a metaphysi-
cal principle as trivially true as "God is not an ethical agent"
as a prohibition upon all moral interrogations of Christian
teachings about God. In point of fact, a moral agent is able to
fail to act justly precisely because he or she suffers the limita-
tion of possessing goodness only by appropriation; he or she
is good only so long as he or she willingly acts in conformity
with Moral Agency as such. That infinite Moral Agency itself,
however, suffers from no defect in respect of its own nature,
and so is never unjust. So, if the traditional Christian philo-
sophical claims about God are true, we are permitted to arrive
at all sorts of analogical conclusions regarding how God might
act, so long as our frame of reference is correct. If we know
what it is for an ethical agent to act in accord with moral good-
ness, then we have some sense, however limited, of what moral
goodness is in itself, in God who is its source and substance.
Now, obviously, this still does not mean - Davies is abso-
lutely right about this- that we have any warrant for trying
to pass judgment on what we take to be God's actions in any
particular isolated worldly event, since any such event is one
whose causes and consequences and conditions and circum-
stances all quickly slip beyond our ken, and we can have no
sense of how that event fits into the pattern of the whole of
things. Any such judgment on our part would be made from
an infinitely inadequate perspective. If, however, we are not
confronted just by this or that particular contingent tragic or
terrible episode or circumstance, of which we are trying to